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F1 2021 Braking Point Review – Ego, team orders and trolling

During the 2013 Malaysian Grand Prix, Red Bull was in with a shout when Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel were leading the pack. As is the case, Red Bull wanted its first driver – Webber in this case – to lead the race and secure points so that Sebastian could play defence, as is the role that second drivers are relegated to.

What followed was a humorous look at what happens when one doesn’t obey team orders, but goes on to win the race. The incident has been fondly remembered through the phrase multi-21 or multimap 21.

These days, team orders are a lot less coy, as we witnessed at several races with the phrase “X is faster than you. Can you confirm”.

Codemasters tries to recreate this and many other incidents that happen off track in its story mode for F1 2021, Braking Point.

In truth, this is the first time the F1 games have introduced a story mode and after six hours, we’re keen to see what the developer can do with this mode moving forward.

As a disclaimer, this review will not include a score as it will form part of a larger review of F1 2021.

Braking Point is different from the Career mode (which is still present and available to play) in that everything is scripted and you won’t be playing a full season of races. The story is very much on rails right up until the end.

Sure, you can win races but you aren’t really shown standings and are instead fed vague lines about “getting some points back”. To a degree, it works but it also creates this disconnect between being the best on track and simply meeting the minimum requirements.

Players take on the role of Aidan Jackson, a rookie racing for either Williams, Aston Martin, Alfa Romeo, Alpha Tauri or Haas. While you will drive in some full length races, where Braking Point shines is when scripted moments put you in or take you out of the action.

As an example, during one of your first races at Silverstone your tyre takes a puncture. Not only do you have to make it back to the pits while navigating Maggots and Becketts and trying to get down the Hangar Straight, you then have to make up places and score points before the race ends.

A few races into the story and you start racing as Jackson’s teammate – Casper Akkerman. It’s a clever twist that lets you see the other side of the coin, but unfortunately we found we spent too much time playing as Akkerman. While we enjoyed how Akkerman’s personality was clearly modelled on Kimi Raikkonen, we would have preferred spending more time as Jackson, learning the ins and outs of F1.

For a first outing, the story is fine and it had us smiling and swearing at rivals more than once.

E-A SPORTS! It’s now in the game

Look, we’re not going to pretend that there aren’t several improvements to the F1 2021 game now that EA owns Codemasters. The cutscenes in Braking Point look really great and there are moments where we thought we were watching scenes from a real race.

However, the in-game cutscenes that bookend a normal race reveal that Codemasters hasn’t exactly improved the driver models over last year. In fact, when you go from a podium celebration to a cutscene, you can see just how vast the visual difference is.

The car models and tracks are incredible though and there is definitely a fidelity improvement over F1 2020 in that regard.

F1 2021 also sees the return of the Podium Pass. This is the upsell once you’ve purchased the game that lets you unlock cosmetic items to customise your driver and car with. While there are free items you can unlock, in order to get all of the items you have to pay. Thankfully nothing important such as Teams or drivers are locked behind the pass so you could ignore it like we did for much of Braking Point.

The fact that EA has a hand in the game’s development and publishing is neither wonderfully good nor terribly bad at this stage and we hope that continues.

Every race is a story

Long time fans of the F1 games will recognise that while the career can be fantastic, having to go through the motions of Free Practice, Qualifying and then ultimately Race Day, can become long in the tooth. Yes, one can skip these but that does detract from the experience of fighting your way through an F1 season.

Braking Point removes this quandary altogether and instead puts you into full races with a single objective in mind or drops you into a race after an incident has occurred.

We’ve mentioned the tyre situation already but there are many more like it such as having to change strategy when rain arrives at Spa-Francorchamps or fighting for position after a prang. After each race or scenario we were eager to see what Codemasters and EA could come up with next. Even the post-race interviews with press are great and we have our thoughts as to why that is – everything in Braking Point is scripted, and we include the racing in that as well.

Why do we include the racing? In one race you are tasked with getting a podium position after your teammate is hit by a rival. The AI in this race was a joke with cars braking early, missing apexes and even being slower on the straight.

We noticed this because in the race before this we tried our damnedest to reach the top four on the grid to no avail, despite driving what we’d describe as a flawless race.

With all of this having been said, when you get into a race with AI representing real F1 drivers, there are some really interesting things to note. For instance, Valteri Bottas defends Lewis Hamilton like a madman and it becomes incredibly tricky to pass the pair if they are together. Max Verstappen is aggressive to the point where we were actually encouraged to back off during a duel down China’s back straight. Hell, we were even bashed into by Nikita Mazepin once or twice.

All of this culminates to a point where each race feels unique and the mechanical nature that was a part of the F1 game’s career mode for so long has all but vanished.

The story that Braking Point tells is rather interesting and kept us engaged enough to want to see it through to the end. While it seems short at six hours, any longer would have felt like it overstayed its welcome

As an out lap then, Braking Point does a lot right, but now Codemasters has a mountain before it.

We would love to see more choice coming to the mode in future. For instance, having a driver offered a seat at another team and needing to decide whether to stay or go would’ve given the mode a bit more replay value. We’d also love to see media interviews having more of an effect than an email giving you a warning not to bad mouth team mates.

Head down, you know what to do.

Buy, wait for sale or skip?

As fans of the nitty-gritty that the F1 games gives you access to, Braking Point is a bit of mindless fun that had us eager to dive into the Career mode and that’s a tall order.

As we mentioned briefly above, the Career mode in F1 games has become a bit stale of late and Braking Point provides a refreshing but still familiar change of pace.

To sum it up in a few words, Braking Point is Drive to Survive for gamers. Sure, things are amped up to get a reaction out of you, but like our very first Multi-21 example, there are moments where long-time fans will nod in recognition of references to F1 moments throughout history.

We rather enjoyed Braking Point and as a result F1 2021 will get a recommendation from us. We’re still working our way through the main career to get a sense of how that mode has improved and we’ll pen our thoughts on that mode next week.

For now, if all you want is a very competent racing game that also happens to have a really good story, F1 2021 is well worth a play.

DISCLAIMER: F1 2021 was reviewed on a PC. Review code was provided to Hypertext.

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